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In this episode, we hear from Lareina Yee, co-author of the book Broken Rung: When the Career Ladder Breaks for Women – and How They Can Succeed in Spite of It.
We often hear about the glass ceiling and how difficult it is for women to break into the very top leadership positions, but the “broken rung” refers to the fact that the promotion disparity begins at the very first level of management.
Lareina wrote the book while she was a senior partner at McKinsey, where she led AI and tech transformation consulting services to software, retail, pharmaceutical and insurance companies. After 25 years with the company, she made a big, bold career change this year — something she advises doing in the interview — and she’s now a vice president at Google.
You’ll leave this episode with a better understanding of why women are promoted less often than men, and practical advice for how to jump past those broken rungs.
Celeste Headlee
Celeste Headlee is a communication and human nature expert, and an award-winning journalist. She is a professional speaker, and also the author of Speaking of Race: Why Everybody Needs to Talk About Racism—and How to Do It, Do Nothing, Heard Mentality, and We Need to Talk. In her twenty-year career in public radio, she has been the executive producer of On Second Thought at Georgia Public Radio, and anchored programs including Tell Me More, Talk of the Nation, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition. She also served as cohost of the national morning news show The Takeaway from PRI and WNYC, and anchored presidential coverage in 2012 for PBS World Channel. Headlee’s TEDx talk sharing ten ways to have a better conversation has over twenty million total views to date.
Lareina Yee
Lareina Yee is a Vice President at Google whose career spans 25 years of leadership specializing in the strategic application of AI and frontier technologies to drive growth and innovation. Before Google, she was the McKinsey Global Institute director leading the technology agenda and the global head of Tech Alliances. She served as McKinsey’s first Chief Diversity Officer and, in 2015, co-founded Women in the Workplace, an annual research study that has worked with more than 1,000 companies and surveyed nearly half a million employees to understand the barriers to women’s advancement in corporate America. She is co-author of the book Broken Rung: When the Career Ladder Breaks for Women – and How They Can Succeed in Spite of It, along with Kweilin Ellingrud and Maria del Mar Martinez.
